


Aziraphale Fails To Stop The Draining Of The Fens

by louwouldapprove



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 17th Century, Guerrilla Warfare, M/M, Rogue Angels, Separation Angst, anarchist angels, heaven is evil, heaven is fascist, the worlds not falling apart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21634171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louwouldapprove/pseuds/louwouldapprove
Summary: Aziraphale is alone in England after Crowley has been assigned to keep an eye on the American Colonies. Approached by rogue angel Zadkiel, who serves God but has abandoned Heaven, Aziraphale agrees to assist with a plan to help stop the enclosure of the English fens in order to protect the livelihood and safety of the common people. Heaven disapproves.This is part of the series The World's Not Falling Apart, with co-creator jackmarlowe.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/gifts).



_There be many rich men, Both Yeomen and Gentry, That for their owne private gaine, Hurt a whole Countrey By closing free Commons; Yet they’le make as though ‘Twere for common good, But I know what I know._

\---- “Come, buy this new Ballad, before you doe goe: If you raile at the Author, I know what I know. To the Tune of Ile tell you but so,” Roxburghe Ballads, 157-60. Published 1847, comprised of a compilation of 17th century ballads reprinted from broadsheets.

_Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labour's rights and left the poor a slave._

\----Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London, 1967) 169–70.

The months had drawn on, into a winter that was colder than ever before. The weather in the early 17th century would be dramatized later, by biographers and tedious historians and then by plummy-voiced lesbian poets making fun of the biographers, but it was damned cold all the same. Aziraphale had been nominally absorbed in the political machinations of London, the Wicked Bible (not the work of Hell, just a tired print technician), the Puritan Migration, et cetera. He also had a rhythm: salons and politics on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, including the occasional meeting with someone mildly important that might somehow impact policies for the better. On these occasions Aziraphale tended to feel a little like a young girl who had to make overtures and suggestions without appearing to do so; nobody should ever remember his name. Every Friday, he went to Rachel’s house in the East part of the city, which he had purchased for her in his own assumed name, in cash. They lit the candles away from the window, because she was still nervous about things like that. She did not ask many questions about him, and over the decades, as he had failed to age, he knew that she understood he was not an ordinary human. But she appreciated him. It was a particularly risky decision, keeping in contact with her, but not the riskiest he had made.

Over the last three decades, his life lying low with Crowley had come together gradually. At first, in the years after Crowley’s meeting with the Lord of the Flies, they took care to appear to do the right work, to meet each other in different places, to choose nights when other things were happening so their superiors were more likely to be distracted. But caution can only last so long. After fifteen years of this--nights carefully selected and scheduled and made to be stolen--they grew tired, because nobody had given any indication of noticing, and because they knew they were running out of time. Hell was sending Crowley away across the Atlantic to suffer in the new colonies and plague-ravaged indigenous cities and newly empty forests of America, Heaven did not seem to have any idea at all about what to do about the colonization, but was not sending Aziraphale anywhere, and Crowley and Aziraphale knew they were parting soon. Where do a demon and angel meet? On the moorwalks; “marriage houses” near each other at convenient times; occasional wild nights in drag in fouler houses where Aziraphale would not be looked for. It was the longest stretch of exultation in either of their lives to that point. But then, finally, Crowley was gone. Hell was all about the colonies, about supervising them, causing their power structures to continue to mirror all the worst bits of Britain while adding new dimensions of small scale tyranny and fear. Aziraphale could foresee a little of it, had asked Crowley to do badly. Crowley agreed he should not do too well, because of the threat to drag him downwards for a promotion.

A note Aziraphale wrote Crowley after his ship had departed for Virginia read:

_I will remember, beloved -The appearance and scent of your magnificent cunt before me as I lay still on the earth in the lavender at Cars Aul Ton, and you parting your skirts the night you borroed Jacob’s dress as a joke turned serious and then we lost him to the crowds, and the night air quite still around us filled with the night noises of birds and creatures_

_-the feel of you pressed against my back, my front, my mouth each Sunday._

_-curled in my arms you are like a cherubim, and I won’t apologize._

_-your delight at the appearance of the orange tree in the royal garden, your awe at the woods of England._

_-the cry you let out when I fucked you so hard you pissed yourself. -the way you look at me when you know you are about to get what you want from me. -the sound of the rustling bushes and the taste of delight on your tongue after I allowed you to turn me over and claim me. I am yours, I do long for your body in mine._

_-The promise you made to me during the day --July 18, 1621-- that you would wed me the day after the world ended, or sooner if I found you a place as palatial as King James’ castle of delight. I can call you my betrothed now, when I’m cross. -your freeing that bear in the bear garden. He was charming, and nobody was hurt badly, and I remember things like that. -the flavor of the bread we ate the morning when the swan attacked that lord in the park. -you, the opening of you and hot swell of you, the whisper and bite of you, the rush of resistance I had to you and the melting, melting melting. Here are some violets._

It was, of course, like giving him a bomb. But that was what they both felt. The letters from Crowley arrived in large packets all at once, for the most part, as there were only a few ships journeying back and forth across the ocean. The first packet arrived at the end of 1629. Crowley had written three letters, but it was the last that caught Aziraphale’s attention and held it through sleepless nights.

It turned out that Heaven did have an idea about what to do in the colonies, and had sent someone after all, to the very place that Crowley was stationed. It was an angel who had never been to Earth before. And this angel and Crowley were already in contact. Aziraphale did not like to feel jealousy, but reading the letter, he had a sickening sense of vertigo. He knew that Crowley loved him, could not get away from him, but Crowley was also searching for connection where he could find it, and it was entirely possible that another angel--like Aziraphale, but maybe braver, maybe closer to Falling, maybe stupider or wiser or easier or more difficult to claim--could capture his attention. In the letter, Crowley was not sure what to do, but Aziraphale could hear the attraction to Thomasine that Crowley felt echoed in his phrases. Crowley and Thomasine were not the only thing on his mind. It was almost three years on now. There wasn’t anything they could do--a trip back to England was possible for Crowley only every so often when a famine struck a town and urgent resupply was needed, or someone needed to parlay with Lords for funding, and Crowley had been told to avoid that. Aziraphale was writing him, missing him, aching about him, and not pushing anything really big forward. In fact, he was not doing very much--checking boxes and reporting back occasionally to Heaven. Cold winter. Letters from Crowley arrived irregularly, if at all, though sometimes Aziraphale had dreams about him that he was certain the demon was having too, because of the turgid reality of them. But there was a great deal of space where Aziraphale was alone, just surrounded by the world.

One day, when he saw a letter with a strange celestial seal, his heart beat fast. But as he opened it, the sensations moving through his body turned to panic. Because it wasn’t Crowley.

Zadkiel.

It was 1631. It was the first he had heard from Zadkiel in five thousand and some odd years. Never a particularly good sign. Aziraphale, like all the other angels stationed on Earth, had heard from Gabriel, in passive-aggressive implicit references, that Zadkiel had Fallen, was no longer in Heaven’s employ, and was not to be heard from or talked to ever again. She was not the only angel to quietly disappear shortly after Adam--there were dozens, if not hundreds, who abandoned Heaven’s payrolls unceremoniously, somewhere in the years before the Flood. You weren’t supposed to talk about them. Upstairs maintained that these Angels had joined or copulated with Lilith’s children or demons on Earth, producing monsters or all sorts. Very very bad, very forbidden, very wicked, against God’s Plan, et cetera. Aziraphale had suspected at the time that some of the reports were overblown, but he didn’t say anything, because Heaven was cracking down rather hard on people and angels alike who made a fuss at that point, and he figured it was better to not draw attention to himself. This was around the time that the Flood had been put in place to sweep away evildoers, including fallen angels. Aziraphale at that time had pitied them. He had also, for a very long time, pitied Heaven. It was an embarrassment to them to have any angel Fall after The Beginning. In the last three thousand years, there had been relatively few that he had known about. Probably partly because there were so few angels left on Earth.

Zadkiel’s loss, though, had been especially hard, because Zadkiel’s purpose--to liberate the enslaved and to bestow the mercy of Heaven--was so important. It looked rather bad to be missing it, because that was--in Egypt, at Sinai, beyond--what Heaven was supposed to do. Heaven mainly reacted to Zadkiel’s disappearance by eliminating the position in their rosters and wiping her name from all reports, while emphasizing that mercy and freedom were a collective duty falling on all Earth operatives equally. They denied that Zadkiel’s role had ever been anything assigned to a single angel, although everyone remembered her. Aziraphale, back in the 13th century, had been starting to get worried about Falling. This was partly because of the way he enjoyed looking at Crowley’s mouth and ass and hands, and partly because of the way that he had stopped feeling as if everything Heaven did had a purpose or rhythm. He knew Crowley didn’t understand his own Fall to have happened suddenly, though he knew there was a point that the Legions had called upon him to join them and Heaven had properly cast him out. Aziraphale understood this to have included a great deal of pain, and also a great deal of battling and clawing and being clawed and stabbed and engulfed in flames, et cetera. Even if the falling of disobedient staff was handled more quietly these days, Aziraphale had thought it prudent to know what might be coming. Aziraphale, catching himself asking hard questions that seemed damned similar to the ones Crowley asked constantly, had wondered how he would know if he was approaching the point of no return. But, to Fall, he thought that it must be true that you were actually drawn to Hell’s angry mission. He tried to envision how the angel of Mercy and Freedom could have turned to Hell and found it beautiful. He had asked Crowley about Zadkiel, briefly, to see if Crowley knew what she was like now, or what her torture or Fall had entailed. Crowley, to Aziraphale’s surprise, had insisted he had not seen her or heard of her joining their ranks, and said--this through a mouthful of strong wine--that Hell would have made “a bigger fucking fuss” if she was Down There. Which meant that Crowley was lying or didn’t know, probably, but which might--maybe maybe--mean that she was somewhere that was neither Heaven or Hell. Aziraphale had been taught not to ask questions of Upstairs, and so didn’t, and eventually Zadkiel slipped his mind as many things did.

Until one day--this day, late in the very cold winter-- she wrote to him.

 _Aziraphale, Angel of the Eastern Gate,_ the letter from Zadkiel had begun, rather baldly. It was on ordinary paper, and though a spell concealed the words from mortal eyes, it would not hold up to any supernatural scrutiny. Aziraphale had almost dropped it into a gutter and run the other direction when he saw her sigil atop. One demon was enough to deal with. But he felt a pull in his gut about it, so he pocketed it, went home, and read it with the curtains drawn, as if the cotton could stop the gaze of Those Above. The letter had proceeded: _As you may kno, I am no longer in Gabriel’s employ, so if that rat bastard gets his finicky tyrann’cal fingers on this paper, please kno I wish thee no ill. If he should punish ye for getting this paper, heartfelt apologies. I am reaching to you because my occasional glances in on ye tell me that you believe well in the capability of humankind to sort their own mess, with some luck and help, without the double dealing fuck-twat-shite of Heaven’s papers and rules, and I’ve need of a brother and partner in my own work on Earth to that end in England. I cannot trust much to paper, anticipating as I do that you may turn this note o’er to Gabriel if I misjudge ye, but if you are interested, you may meet me at the ale house nearest your City rooms any Tuesday you like (the rest of the time I am elsewhere, so do not seek me then). Trust me when I say I serve not Satan or the legions of Hell; for I would not ever trade one master for another, nor turn the pain I feel at Heaven toward others in rage or torment or callousness, much as the evils of this world shake me. I do what I was Made for still, against all those who’d stop me. Be well, angel. Know that if you play this right, you need not wander as I do outside Heaven. You can stay in their employ until such a time as they topple down from the bigness of their own heades, for all I mind. They need not know. But you can still help my cause. I remember you as a friend; I know your work on Earth to free men from walls, and to know them truly. Justice, Justice, you shall pursue_ (this written in Hebrew script) _Zadkiel_

The fact was that he was really terribly lonely without Crowley. There wasn’t anything else going on in London, really. And it was the most exciting and interesting thing that had happened since Crowley left. Crowley had thought that all rogue angels were killed on the spot, but if this really was Zadkiel, maybe that wasn’t true, and maybe Aziraphale had a future outside heaven’s grasp. Aziraphale did not phrase it to himself in this way--he had too much panic in him for that--but he was excited, beneath the throes of agonizing terror. The idea of a rogue angel, who not only had evaded Satan and Gabriel but had projects and was aware, somehow, of detailed information about Aziraphale, made Aziraphale’s stomach churn and set his mind alight thinking of ways things might go wrong, or right. It could be ruin or hope. He wished he had someone to talk to, who understood him. And if it was a trap, a way to out him, to blackmail him with information about his dealings with demons in order to rope him into some scheme that was against Heaven’s will, or an effort by Heaven to catch him breaking rules--well, it wouldn’t do to ignore it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale meets with rogue angel Zadkiel, and she discusses justice.

Aziraphale had met Zadkiel on the following Tuesday, after a long night. He had thought about telling Crowley in a letter and decided not to, and thought about telling Gabriel and decided not to. He had thought about vanishing into the depths of space. But he rose and went to the alehouse.  
The alehouse closest to Aziraphale’s rooms was, despite its location near the heart of the City, really just a place to stop in for working men: a little room with a long bar and kegs of lukewarm to warm beer and the push of men’s bodies. It was a good place to get out of the cold, sealed in with body heat and a brick oven in the back. In future centuries it would become a carriage house, an illegal sublet, a show space, and then a single car garage. Aziraphale liked spaces like these in certain contexts, and the ale house on this day had a little stream of cold sun pouring through it and the light on men’s faces made everyone look beautiful. He sat for a while before seeing her. The ale was not strong; the men merely paid to take a load off their feet and be warm and sit and maybe sing together. Eventually, he turned, and there she was. Zadkiel was in the corner, a short, stout figure wearing all brown, a scarf wrapped around her, her hands by the fire. She did not speak to him in the ale house, only signaled with her eyes and the flash of her Being at him so he had known to follow her.   
The part of the city she was in was a long way from Aziraphale, in the north, up near the place where city became gradually forest and farm. It was an icy walk. The spaces between buildings was vaster. Aziraphale was used to walking, but the mud gradually quickened and deepened under his feet, and he found himself trading more gingerly across the icy surfaces.  
Zadkiel had led him slowly through side streets a little hovel at the end of a dead-end no-name street, which was covered all over with spells against discovery that made it so Aziraphale could almost not stand to look at it. One’s eyes wanted to slide over the house entirely, to the trash heap beside it. Aziraphale had seen similar spells from demons, to repel his eyes or ability to act. When such spells were demon-cast, they were painful to touch or move through. But Zadkiel had pulled Aziraphale wordlessly in by the hand, and they passed through the ripple of anti-detection like fish through the veil of a river.   
Once inside, for the first time in his life, a deep, seagoing, sudden and freefalling sensation took hold of him. Aziraphale felt the faint pull of Heaven’s ties on him vanish. It was disorienting, like thinking one is suspended in a swing and then finding the anchors and upward tether absent, one’s feet only on the ground after all.   
“What is this?” he asked Zadkiel, afraid, turning to her. She smiled, her human form leaning on her little chair, watching him.  
“Don’t want Heaven lookin’ in. And it’s good to be on the Earth for a moment, without them pulling. You knew I was not in their good books, angel, don’t look at me like I’ve brought you to a house of sin or the mouth of Hell. You’ve done things worse in their eyes than this.”  
He reeled for a little and held to the cob wall. Herbs hung from the ceiling and papers crowded the one-room house. In the center of the room was a printing press.   
Aziraphale’s first question, after he had taken off his overcoat and two more layers and sat down at the low table, had been about her situation. The difficulty was that he knew part of the answer before he even asked.   
She wasn’t Fallen.   
Demon’s auras were different, carrying a certain scent of the smoke at the middle of creation, the smudge and pain of alienation, the hurt and anger of rising from being cast down. Zadkiel had a different feeling to her. She smelled like peat and pine and wind and sun and ocean, like weeds and seaweed and musk. She smelled of earth.   
But he asked anyway.  
“I haven’t Fallen, you antic,” she said. “Not the way you’re thinking. I’m no demon. That’s just Gabriel again, isn’t it, painting it again all up. Now, I shan’t poison your ear against him but I’m sure by this time you see how Heaven works a little.”  
“How is that?” Aziraphale asked. He already felt that he was in too deep. A mysterious force sat with him, looking at him with bright eyes.  
“The lies, the power, the armies styling themselves military like the poor sods down here on earth. All very disorderly, all very --” she paused. “Well, I’d call it rotten evil. What are they really doing, anyway?”  
Aziraphale considered her, the small fat woman in all brown, as she set about pulling cider from a glass jar with a tap that sat over by her one small window. She radiated power and also a force of enormous, almost overpowering goodness. “Well, helping fight evil. Is that a serious question?”  
“Yes, angel dear. What are they having you do? I mean direct orders, not what you do alone.”  
“They largely trust my judgement,” Aziraphale allowed. “But they did instruct me not to let Fawkes blow up Parliament.” That had been over twenty-five years ago. A couple orders had come down since, but not major ones. Aziraphale felt that in general he was being told to stay in a kind of holding pattern, blessing people and allowing divine intervention and holy grace here and there, keeping things moving. Keep things stable. Boring work, but that was work.  
“What kind of silly thing is that? What, when they’ve allowed hundreds of wars and coups? Killings of Americans all, and rampage and betrayal and slavery along the coast of the African kingdoms?”  
“Strategy, I suppose,” Aziraphale said, but he allowed his tone to show that he thought it was stupid too. The problem was he had not allowed himself to think too deeply on what he would say if he was free to talk as he pleased, except when he was with Crowley and felt a little saner. Even then, he never relaxed. Looking over his shoulder was one of his main activites.  
“It’s like She said to Samuel when the Israelites asked for a king,” Zadkiel said. “You accept their authority, you take what goes with, like. Which is in this case steaming piles of bullshit.”  
“I understand what you mean. There are things that come with a contract with Heaven. Responsibilities, things that can feel banal or unproductive. What, ah, bullshit made you finally decide to...go off on your own ?” Aziraphale knew that this was the Question that would lead to more. The apple, as it were. But he had already sort of been there, multiple times. Enough to know that there was more than one answer to that question.  
“Well, they’re twat-shites, aren’t they. Telling you always not to intervene, to let God’s work stand, to let them fuck about with people just because they like and they think it proves a point about their power. I know what you’re going through, angel, because I did it too. Just had less patience for it. Packed and left.”  
“I didn’t like the Flood,” Aziraphale said, his voice lowered. “I agree with your impressions, about a lot of it. But I guess I haven’t reacted the same way. They don’t understand everything, but I think, surely there’s a way to work with them to do good here.”  
“You trust more than me. Here’s what I think. The power is really the only thing they know any more. You think they know Love? Not a chance. Damned tyrannical, just like kings.”  
Aziraphale tried to react to this, but found he couldn’t. “But they serve, you know, the King,” he said. “God. We, I mean,” he added nervously. “We.”  
“We certainly do, or try,” Zadkiel said. “You and me. Not them.”  
Aziraphale looked at her in confusion.   
“I try hard to serve God. You try very hard. But as I’m sure you know, God’s hidden, and not really like a king at all. Not even really like a person, though you can describe God in personal terms.”  
“But that’s--I mean, Heaven has the direct line. They know more of the Plan, I suppose, even if I feel doubtful about it sometimes.” Aziraphale accepted the cider offered him.  
“Bread, brother? Bacon?”  
“No, I’m afraid I just ate. Thank you kindly for this cider. Very good.” He paused and allowed himself to feel the pleasure of sitting without feeling that faint yank upward. Sinking in. “Forgive me, Zadkiel, but your situation just isn’t something I understand. My...a friend has told me that there are other rogue angels, but my impression was that they are all immolated fairly quickly, or Cast Out, depending on the circumstances. I think Heaven has kept it all rather quiet. They’ve told everyone that you’ve been in the Pit since the Flood, reassigned your duties, et cetera.”  
“And are my duties getting done on Heaven’s command?” She raised an eyebrow above one brown, bright eye. “Are mercy and freedom prevailing?”  
Aziraphale looked at her. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t the, you know. The Work is still being completed. We have fewer agents than we should. But the work is...you know, moving.”  
“Not the work they do from Heaven.”  
“You said you served God. How do you do that if you aren’t in line with Heaven?”  
“God isn’t in Heaven, angel, or hadn’t you got to thinking on that yet?”  
“I...I haven’t gotten there yet, no,” Aziraphale said. This was more and different than he expected. He sipped again from the cider, studying Zadkiel’s red dark face in the dim light. A small piece of sunlight was coming through and illuminating the space around her head. “Wh...Where do you think God is, if not Heaven?”  
“With us. With everyone. In the earth and the skies and space and stars, the matter of the seas and the plants and the good saltwater marshes. In unity, in love, in mercy, in care, in sadness and friendship and passion.” She smiled. “Shards of light.”  
“But--yes, but the actual...I mean, the speaking God. There is that too, isn’t there. God was in Heaven. Last I was in God’s Presence.”  
“A long time ago.” She drank from her cider cup.  
A beat lasted for a while and the fire crackled. Aziraphale thought.  
“Fair,” Aziraphale said. “Yes, I mean, they do rather keep us away from the Throne now.”  
“If by Throne, you mean the metaphorical space we once inhabited which was full of God? It’s empty. It’s been empty, angel, for a long, long time. Since the Fall.”  
“But --and supposing I give you a second, a second where I don’t question that idea--the voice that comes down, to prophets and mystics--”  
“God sometimes, not speaking from the throne. Speaking from within and around. Sometimes someone else speaking for God.”  
“I don’t believe all of this.”  
“You needn’t.” Zadkiel stretched her arms above her head, then stood to fix herself some bread with bacon. “It’s all preface. To asking you to do something meaningful with me.”  
“I do understand what you mean, of course, about Heaven. Really I wonder that Gabriel and Metatron are allowed to carry on as they are. But I don’t believe everything. This is a lot very quickly, I mean. I don’t know you, don’t trust you. I have been hearing for years you are a demon. I can’t.”  
“Best for you that you don’t believe me completely, if you plan on staying with them.” She belched. “I don’t need you to leave Heaven, angel. You can make your own choices about how to serve the Name.” She shrugged and threw back her cider. “What I’m asking for is just your cooperation on one project of mine. Saving good people, a good place. Saving freedom for the people of England, at least for a while. They don’t know of it yet. We can make something good of it.”  
Aziraphale shivered with the strange force of Love that came through Zadkiel as she spoke. He tried to piece things together.  
“You’re still… you’re still trying to be the angel of Freedom and Mercy,” he concluded after studying her.  
“Yes.”  
“So you’ve been doing your own Works without reporting back or anything for the last three thousand plus years?”  
“Yes. Have a lot of projects going, right now. With collaborators. Humans mostly. Some with the Sikhs. Some with resistance movements in Mexico. Some angels like you. Things can get done if you try. Some things, anyway.”  
“What kinds?”  
“Rebellions, hidden places to live in peace, peace agreements, safe end to abuse, access to land and food and water for ordinary people and animals. All over, mind. Not all of us are bound to England. I have capacities that are stronger than many.”  
“And Heaven’s agents haven’t--come to cast you into the Pit, or anything?” he asked, a little timidly. “For--well, for bad mouthing them? You didn’t crawl out of Hell for these works?”  
“Nae, dear angel,” she said. “I am still an Angel. I do the work of God. They cannot revoke it from me and cannot cast me into the Pit, for I have no will to go. If they summon’d me back to Heaven, they could keep me locked from Earth, but I’ve cut the cord quite completely.”  
Aziraphale considered this, a door suddenly swinging open in his head, pointing toward a vast and clear open sky, a huge, dangerous hope. To be free. To be working in the service of the Love he believed was possible without having to talk to Gabriel ever again, without having to hide...but it was impossible. “You mean they can’t recall you?”  
“Tried. I am as powerful as Gabriel, one of the original high Seraphim. They know it. Sent a bolt down for me, didn’t they, and I snapped it. My bond is only to God and the service of Her peoples.”  
“Snapped it. Oh.” Aziraphale swallowed. “I don’t think I could do that. Rather weak upper body strength, me. At least against an Archangel.”  
She looked Aziraphale up and down. “You could do it too. You can get stronger. God is still there, for strength. All round.”  
Aziraphale felt himself starting to cry. He was developing a headache. “This is a lot to take in,” he managed to say quietly. “I don’t think I like this. Not now. My friend told me of an angel fresh from Heaven who went mad and went rogue over in the Colonies and has been utterly destroyed. Didn’t even do anything horrid or evil, just ---just was too loud, too in love with humans. And I know I have done worse. I think I feel rather scared.”  
“Well, I’m here. Less scary to know it can go right, surely.”  
“Zadkiel, how am I to believe any of what you’re saying about Heaven being no good? I know all the horrible parts of it, but it can’t be that they’re as wrong as you say. Surely they’re just... incompetent at certain things?”  
“Incompetence at doing good looks a lot like malevolence when it goes on so long.”  
“This goes against everything I know.” If Heaven had lost Zadkiel, really hadn’t been able to recall her, had no power over her, and could not find her here, it meant that at least for the moment he was safe to say what he liked. But he couldn’t.  
“It doesn’t, or you wouldn’t be crying, or sitting here. You know.” She shrugged. “But do what you like. If you would like to see how I work, though, join me here on this project I have in the Fens. Save the peasants for another day, help them live without meddling.”  
“If I am discovered it would go badly for us both. --Zadkiel, what do you know about me?”  
“I know you love the works of God in the world, even if you are confused and you limit yourself so you don’t ask questions.” She was chewing her food and said this in a muffled kind of way.  
Aziraphale nodded. This was consistent with his own self-appraisement. “Well, thank you.”  
“I know you love deeply a Fallen angel who Heaven knows little about. Who loves you. I know you see the capacities in Creation for change, for healing.”  
This had obviously been one of the things Aziraphale was afraid of. “Does Heaven know anything of us? How do you?”  
“I have had a man in Bugg Acton’s bed house since the last ginger Tudor frog was on the throne,” Zadkiel said. “Heaven did not, and Hell did not. I had been watching you, not all the time but in a general way, thinking of you as a potential partner in my work. The thing with the Fens has come up. So I asked after you. Heaven didn’t put in the effort to see. They only felt the waves rippling out, I suspect, whenever it was you first made contact. They knew something had happened, but did not know what. They sent agents after, but the agents did not know where to look. My agent did, could feel the pulse of creation here in London. And neither Heaven nor Hell doth look too deeply, or understand very much. My people have been on Earth a long time. We know what it is.”  
“I had no idea anyone knew. And no part of this--you inviting me here.” Aziraphale paused. “I’m not being blackmailed, am I?” He began to consider again his position on Hell. Alienation was the root of it, but they had real fire.  
“No. No pet of Heaven I. Nor Hell. And your doings with the fellow are no interest to me, unless he would like to work with me.”  
“If Upstairs or Below did know, either of them, it would be awful, wouldn’t it?” Is there anyone who has gotten love and safety and happiness long term out of something like this, is what he wanted to ask. Something like what Crowley and I are doing.  
Zadkiel tisked like Aziraphale was intentionally playing the fool. “You could fight them. Their power is from people thinking there is nothing else.”  
“But what I’m asking--they would try to do something awful to me, or ---to the fallen angel.” He tried to say this lightly, omitting Crowley’s name at the last second in case someone, somewhere, could hear him.  
“Hell should like you to be a demon for them, and would believe that was what was happening if they knew, unless your lover did good works, in which case they would probably destroy him. But they would not like the way you are now. They would like you broken and angry and hurt, like them. Heaven should believe you were to be a demon if they knew as well, and if they knew they would cast you to Hell or immolate your Being, and you would be powerless as long as you believed in their power.”  
“Do you know if they know? You said they had no agents, but do you know?”  
“Your beloved is so far safe, and you too. Gabriel is an arse worm and too thick with shit to see anything on his own, most of the time. Though you should worry about the work of Heaven and Hell in Virginia. And you should worry about the people here in England, suffering and starving.”  
“I do.” Aziraphale still wasn’t sure if this was just subtle blackmail, but he was faced with the might of Zadkiel’s Love again as it blew the flame up into the flue for a moment, and he considered all the ways he might be doing more.   
“Then for now, at least while he is there, your part can be to help me. You can help. You can see how I work. Your part is small, but can have an impact.”  
In this moment of earthshaking revelation, Aziraphale felt that there wasn’t much else to do but to see.  
The situation as she explained it to him then was this: the Bedford Level Corporation had been formed with the intent of draining the Fens and implementing enclosure of common land there, as indeed, she figured, the aristocrats of England intended to enclose all common land and keep it from the people, thus to starve them into submission. She was in London, like Aziraphale, following events, though her strategy had been to serve as a maid in the Court and gather intelligence and observe the talk of those planning such things more closely.   
“Does Heaven strongly oppose the draining?” he asked, carefully. He could not do something he could not reasonably be seen to do anyway. Nothing so big.  
“Don’t strongly much of anything, do they? They probably would like the restoration of the medieval dykes and embankments so’s to restore the cathedrals, I suppose. I suspect they’d be against stopping the draining.”  
“I don’t actually know their position on Cathedrals,” Aziraphale said. “I rather think they like having some of them derelict, so as to inspire a tragic sense of history in artists.”  
“Well, angel. You can go and ask and then disobey them, or go and disobey them without asking, or say nothing and obey what you think they want to do.” She looked at him. “Only there’s an awful lot of riches in the marshes, aren’t there, for poor people who are struck down in every other way and killed for poaching or for bullshit. There are villages in there of seamen avoiding the hellish Navy, of peace-seekers, of ordinary fucking and cursing and damaged people who need only to have some bracken and peat and greenery covering them to be safe in this life.”  
“I’ll help,” Aziraphale said.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale assists with a revolutionary movement.

Spring 1661

He saw her first across the marsh, after realizing that what he thought was a copse of trees overhanging brush and stump also included several human figures. She was wearing a dark tunic, and her hair was thin and brown and hung down in plaits past her soulders. She was small and heavy and strong, like the women around her, but she stood out in her bearing, her sense of being absolutely grounded. Her face was shadowed by her broad straw hat, but Aziraphale could see the dark freckling of her ruddy skin from this distance. The faded green and yellow brown and dark water flashing reflections of the sky made the little group of brown-clad women on stilts almost disappear in the dappled gray light of late autumn.   
She squinted towards him, and waved a small hard hand against the sky.   
“Brother!”  
Aziraphale waved his hand awkwardly from where he sat in the small boat. The coat and trousers he was wearing were all mud from the knees down and the elbows forward, because of falling twice on the path down to the wet pasture where he had retrieved the boat left for him by Zadkiel and her comrades. It was a fine day, with thin clouds moving fast across the sky, but the cold of autumn stung him. Aziraphale had started letting himself be cold--in order to understand the plight of humanity, but also to feel the pleasure of warmth more keenly--but it meant his hands were red and painful jammed into his pockets. He pushed his boat through the reeds with only a little miraculous help, and his shoulders were sore. He was really quite uncomfortable, and didn’t see exactly what mission would require him to be as on-the-ground as this, but was willing to put in the work if it meant, for once, something got done in a big way.  
The fens had taken days to get to, on horse and then by boat down the River Ouse and through the flooded meres and canals. Aziraphale had made this trip before, but it felt harder each time.   
“Sister,” he said, as he approached Zadkiel. Her celestial aura shone brighter than the sun through amber against the dark ancient peat. Aziraphale breathed in a little deeper than he usually did as she smiled at him and for a moment revealed her true face: the enormous, many-eyed Angel of Freedom and Mercy, hands outstretching to hold everything in a state of divine grace. Aziraphale remembered her from Before, when her being rippled in waves over each spasm of the Divine. The flash went unregistered by her human friends, but Aziraphale felt the powdery ancient wind pouring from her mouth to carry tzedek into the world and push evil out. The flash of her, opened into the material world for the briefest instant, made the reeds in a ten yard radius around her grow two inches taller, and, though Aziraphale could not see this, a nearby mud embankment developed a fracture that would gradually reflood a drained field.  
“It’s good to see you,” Zadkiel said. “Your journey has been well, I trust.”  
“As good as possible,” Aziraphale said. “I’m afraid it’s been a while.”   
The women she was with studied Aziraphale carefully. Their ruddy and sun-brown faces were guarded, flat-affect. Aziraphale knew he looked like a city aristocrat, even dressed down the way he was, and he felt the anxiety ripple across them as they heard his London courtly accent.   
“We’ll fill you in on details,” Zadkiel said. “Now, Az, meet Bess, Ellener, Mary, and Hannah.”  
“Good women, I am pleased to join you,” Aziraphale said. He tried briefly to stand in his boat to bow, leaning on the pole he had been pushing along with, but lost his balance quickly and sat back down again. “Oh dear. Please trust I am bowing in spirit.” He took off his wicker hat and inclined his head, using his other hand to try and steady the boat.   
“Steady your weight, sir,” said the woman who had been indicated as Bess.  
“You’re Zaddie’s brother, then?” one of the women--Hannah-- asked. She had long yellow hair going gray at the roots and one of her eyelids drooped over her eye at the corner.  
“Well, we are brother and sister to each other,” Aziraphale said, looking at Zadkiel for confirmation. He was not quite clear on what she had told the fen-dwellers about her origins. The easy way they stood by her, looked to her, made Aziraphale feel strange, like being near the eye of a tornado.  
“Indeed,” Zadkiel said. “Az is my kin, from far back in the early years of water and sky, and here and elsewhere has been well and rightly involved with our struggle.”  
Aziraphale nodded, slightly stiffly, feeling like the thin clouds rushing across the sky were all that protected him from the scrutiny of Heaven.

“We’ll be back at my hole-hovel in a bit,” Zadkiel said kindly, “And you can put your feet up after your journey.”  
“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “Of course.” He felt a little cross. Zadkiel, in her most recent letter, had not given him more than the barest outlines of what her plan was   
One of the women with her--Aziraphale thought it was Mary--pulled at Zadkiel’s sleeve, leaned in and whispered something a little crossly in Zadkiel’s ear.  
“Say it to him,” Zadkiel said. “He can answer better than I can.”  
“What I’d like to know,” Mary said, “is how’s we are supposed to understand you as a friend, seeing as you come from outside and look like one of their Bedford company fellows only dressed a’somber like and all mud.”  
“I promise,” Aziraphale said.  
“Trust him,” Zadkiel said. “He is an angel.”

Draining the fens was intended to make arable land to feed the people in the face of widespread famine caused by overtaxation. In fact, the draining did make arable land, but the arable land immediately became property of lords, and the common marshes they replaced no longer fed the people. Besides that, the draining caused the level of the earth to gradually lower as the peat was exposed to air and oxified. The land shrank and eventually would be flooded again, and be neither useful fen nor useful farm--the rhythm of the sea--unless the dykes and embankments were built higher. The people who lived there did not have to witness this to understand that it would happen. The people who didn’t live there refused to believe it would.  
The women showed Aziraphale how to wield the tools they had been using, after their men (if they had them--two did not) had been taken away to be nonchalantly murdered by the mercenaries of the Bedford leveling company. They had asked Zadkiel for help, and she had heard and answered, and had now brought Az to help too. Both Az and Zadkiel were angels, and would stand with the people against the might of the lords. This was their understanding of what had happened.  
Zadkiel summarized the plans to Aziraphale. Basically, they would lend weight to the peasants’ moral position. An angel’s magic can make short work of something that is usually a long project. Not too much help, but not nothing.  
The burning embankments and mangled hedges--put in place by yeoman laborers weeks before, cut down by rebels, put laboriously back in-- fell apart from two sides, and a gust of wind snapped the blade of a drain-pump in half before the astonished eyes of a local lord, who proceeded to deny the event for the rest of his days. The hedges and pumps were symbols of the power and control the landowners wielded, and all hated them, even if they didn’t understand that the new drained land would never belong to the people. Bystanders--for all this happened in daytime-- cheered, and if the lords on the hill had better muskets, they would have fired, but they had nothing effective for shooting at peasants who knew the waterways, and they could only run their horses toward the swamp so far.   
Aziraphale and Zadkiel would touch something, and blow, or hum, and things would happen to help the fen’s protectors. The hedges put in to divide drained wetlands burned. The first pumps burned, in an event that would never be recorded in any history book, except one account that attributed it to a strong spring storm. Zadkiel and Aziraphale pulled from opposite sides of the deep walls of earth and stone and raised land until they fractured and resumed their desired form--wet silt.  
It happened again and again.  
Water would flow, for several months while the Bedford corporation regrouped, back into the places it was meant to be. The company would level it again, the workers and the fen dwellers would fight like anything with iron bars, trowels, poles, knives, and the work would be finished--but then dissolve days later.   
Bess told Aziraphale about the houses on stilts they had devised to be portable, in a manner of speaking, so you could shift with the season and wind. Bess had been a maid for a lord who had done her some unmentioned evil and sentenced her to death. Her mother was with her friends, back deeper in the fens.   
She was one of the ones Aziraphale took with him back into the city when Bedford returned in earnest. Her manners and clothes were rough, but Aziraphale found he liked this. Honesty was good.  
Fen tigers, they were called in print. What they had achieved was minimized. Who they killed was left unmentioned, since despite the fire they had not gotten a shot at the lords and had mainly killed other low-class yeoman who were scabbing out for pay. The scale of what they were doing and its distance from the metropolis made it hard to understand for city people. The rioting was attributed, in polite circles in the Capital, to stupid earth-muddled country bastards not knowing what was good for them. Which was of course, the Crown.  
Aziraphale found himself playing host to a lot of Tigers. He found them all discreet but comfortable rooms or boats down on the river--the latter preferred, since it meant quick escape if necessary. Many of them did not stay in London long, but he connected them with others Zadkiel knew, in Wales or in Ireland, and they traveled. There were fens all over.  
It was the most accomplished he had ever felt in his life.  
He wrote Crowley in code, wanting to be discreet.   
_Found middle path_ , the note read. _I will tell you later. I love you, divine thing. Be my wife inside the tides and salt air. There is a secret space for us, once you can return to me._  
His good mood lasted for almost a year.

A packet of letters arrived from Crowley in June. Aziraphale tore into them, hoping for something. 

Shortly after this, one day, as he was walking through the muddy street in the middle of summer, stepping around a small puddle of vomit that a gentleman had deposited in front of his rooms in the middle of the previous night, he caught a decided scent of Heaven’s perfume behind him, purple and bright and moved by celestial forces through the gross matter of reality as if it was meant to have another dimension to it.  
“Gabriel,” he said, without turning around. Then he turned.   
A white hole stretched across the entirety of the sky, to frighten him. Then it condensed into the archangel.  
“Aziraphale,” Gabriel said sternly. “I think we need to talk.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel chastises Aziraphale.

Heaven

Space out of time

Scene: a large white room with glassy windows facing out onto endless clouds and sun. The sun itself is not visible. The light is the light of late morning, forever. 

Gabriel is sitting facing Aziraphale in a low wicker chair with a cushion made of silky material. Aziraphale is sitting in a similar chair. He is wearing English court dress in all white. His hair is long. Gabriel is wearing a long robe made of material not known to man but resembling linen with embroidered corners. His hair is longer than Aziraphale’s.  
“You understand, of course, Aziraphale, that this reflects poorly on your understanding of protocol.”  
“I understand completely. I’ve been enormously foolish.” Aziraphale was looking directly at Gabriel’s eyes with what he understood to be his puppy dog expression. “I simply thought it was new protocol, and that I’d mislaid instructions somehow.” He adjusted his shirtsleeves. He had decided to play dumb, because he knew any other option would result in far worse punishment. You didn’t argue with Heaven. There was no room for motion, for friction. You could not advocate for your good intentions to an organization that believed they knew The Plan. You just laid down and did what they asked you and hoped for the best. Sometimes it went all right. Hopefully in the long term it would all go right.   
“Do you often mislay instructions?”  
Gabriel knew about the sword. He said this to remind Aziraphale of it.   
“Not often. But during the horrible affair with the Black Plague, I did have a list which ended up in a pile of other paper when they started burning things to contain the disease. And there was a large fire a while back, in London, which got some of my things.” Aziraphale smiled helplessly. “This time, there had been so long without an order that I was expecting one, I think. I’m sorry that I didn’t refer it back to you to confirm details. I tend to trust agents who claim to be working for God, who are clearly angels. Maybe too easily.”   
“Zadkiel is no longer an angel.”  
Aziraphale was silent for a second. Then he nodded. “Right. Of course.”  
“She Fell. You knew that.”  
“Well, that’s what everyone said, at the time.”  
“You must have seen her Being and known who she was.”  
“I--did not expect to see her on Earth,” Aziraphale said. “I haven’t seen her in all this time.”  
“So you thought she’d come back and was in God’s graces again?”  
“She didn’t look like a demon. She talked about God and justice. She presented clear reasons for the mission.”  
“Which were what?”  
“That the fen draining would cause famine, that it would destroy whole ecosystems, that it would enable lords to abuse their power by controlling grain supply, that it would allow lords the power to kill and trap innocent people they disliked by accusing them of poaching. That it would enable lords to be worse men, and prevent ordinary people from believing in justice.”  
“Matters like that are beneath Heaven, Aziraphale.”  
“Can you explain why we should have intervened in Fawkes but not in that?” Aziraphale asked, before realizing that he had already asked too many questions, too early on, without apologizing enough. Gabriel eyed him with suspicion.  
“The orders I deliver are ineffable.”  
“I believe them, and carry them out.” Aziraphale was cautious enough to keep his gaze lowered. “I’m sorry.”  
“Aziraphale, have you been harboring doubts?” Gabriel raised his eyebrows.  
“No. I do want clarification on scale. Human individuals are worthy subjects for focus when it comes to divine moments of ecstasy or Good Works like staying with a sick wife or planting a garden for an old neighbor. Why not revolutions? Why not mutual aid?”  
“That is sometimes our cause. But only when Heaven’s larger purpose should be served. Flooded marshes mean nothing. Earth’s landscape changes anyway.”  
Aziraphale wanted to say, but they are destroying it faster, the men with power. He wanted to say, what is Heaven’s purpose if not justice, when we have the means to do miracles? He wanted to say, there are people who know how to live with the land and people who fight to control it and to control the resources it can produce and who will throw fellow humans into the sea or shoot them en masse or keep them in poverty to have power. But he did not.  
“In this case--Fawkes means more. It was determined that we should not allow the total destruction of Parliament at this time. Parliament shall give way to other forms of government, in time, but Fawkes was not the instrument.”  
Aziraphale swallowed everything he wanted to say to that. “Yes, I see. I’m sorry.”  
“You know the Divine Plan as well as any of us. Life on Earth will get worse before the last battle; it is in moments of individual and collective resistance to evil that humanity can be redeemed. We cannot do that for them. But check in if you get worried about something like this. We can help you figure out what to do.”  
“There has been very little communication, and I misunderstood our goals. I will look in more in the future.”  
“Can you help me understand why you thought we would send you an actual project through an emissary like that? I mean, have we ever sent you a mission without an official herald and seal?”  
“No,” Aziraphale said. He clasped his hands on his lap and tried to look contrite. Was Gabriel really commenting on Zadkiel’s wardrobe?   
“And yet you accepted that we were sending you a ragged little dumpy button of an angel in order to tell you to flood some backwater farmland and gather peasants to violently rebel against their state?”  
“The Lord works--”  
“In mysterious ways, Aziraphale. But have some fucking sense.”  
“Yes, I will try.” Aziraphale allowed himself to tear up a little. The underlying bubbling rage made it easy. “I shall not displease God or Heaven. That is my greatest fear.”  
Gabriel smiled. He bought what Aziraphale was selling. “No need to be dramatic. It’s a little mix-up. You didn’t do anything truly wrong, just worked on something useless and were effectively distracted from useful duties. But it’s clear we need to refresh you on your mission. And have you check in more about your activities. You generally run things fairly well in London. I’m very pleased with much of your recent work. But regular updates would have allowed us to quash this Zadkiel stuff thirty years back.”  
“I’ve been foolish,” Aziraphale said.  
“Your ignorance is the heart of your divinity,” Gabriel said gently.  
Aziraphale, eyes welling with half-real tears, could not suppress a brief, bitter smirk. He tried hurriedly to recompose his face and appear pious and apologetic and calm and without thoughts. “It is, Gabriel?”  
Gabriel had not seen the smirk. “Ignorance of how it feels to be evil or desire it is what composes you. You never had doubts, Aziraphale, as others did, before the Fall. Did you?”  
“No,” said Aziraphale.  
“You believe quite fully in Good and the power of God, and you believe many people and many things are more full of Good than they are. It is how you were made. And all that is good.”  
“Well, I hope so,” Aziraphale said, looking at the floor so as to hold his face steady.  
“But you must trust those of us with more information. Who are in direct contact with the Metatron, and the King of Kings.”  
“Yes.”  
“Follow the fucking protocol, or you’ll be double-crossed by agents of Hell before you can blink.”  
Aziraphale nodded vigorously, wide-eyed, to be safe. “Yes,” he said.  
“That demon, Crowley,” Gabriel said, standing.   
Aziraphale went completely white and felt his immaterial Being begin to twist inside his stomach in a deeply uncomfortable way. Gabriel could have Seen with his ten thousand eyes, but he was looking out the window, up at the invisible sun.   
“What about him?” he finally managed.   
“As you may remember, he was sent to America,” Gabriel said. “A while back.”  
“Yes, I think I remember,” Aziraphale said in what he believed was a flat tone.  
Gabriel turned around and Aziraphale wondered if his trembling was visible in the white room with perfect lighting. “While Crowley was there, he seduced an agent of Heaven,” he said to Aziraphale seriously.  
“Really,” Aziraphale said.  
“Unfortunately. It really does highlight our weaknesses, infrastructurally.”  
Aziraphale was quiet again for a long moment before responding. “I had no idea that was possible.”  
“This is part of why I’m being so serious about this business with the fens.” Gabriel slowly walked back to his chair and sat down. “I don’t want you to go the same way, Aziraphale.”  
“I wouldn’t like to either,” Aziraphale said, feeling the sweat dripping down behind his ear and under his arms.   
“I doubt you would be vulnerable to a demon like Crowley, since you’ve been long on Earth and at least know how to see that kind of enormous evil, but I say it as a warning, since Zadkiel took you in. Crowley is coming back to England soon, we think. It is hard to keep tabs on demons, so we will be counting on you to keep track of his whereabouts and stay updated on his activities.”  
“Of course,” Aziraphale said.   
Gabriel tilted his head. “You look like you have questions,” he said to Aziraphale.  
Aziraphale bit his lip and tried to moderate his breathing. “Can you say any more about the angel sent down to the colonies? I should like to know what went wrong. So I can--well. Do my service to Heaven better.”  
Gabriel smiled and rolled his eyes and shrugged. It was his typical move when he could feel confident putting blame on another department. “Oh, that. We sent an angel who had never entered before into the world to monitor America and the colonies there. Thomasina. Absolutely the most disastrous decision HR has made in ages. Barely met Crowley before the demon completely ensnared hir, had his claws in pulling our angel into the pit. Sex with humans, sex with the demon, intoxicants, attempted murder… we underestimated Hell, not that you should say that to anyone.”  
“How did you learn of this?” Aziraphale asked, hoping the anxiety in his voice would be read as something normal. “Of the deception.”  
“Well, it’s unfortunate, also confidential if anyone asks you, but actually it was the humans. They put hir on trial. Our angel was copulating indiscriminately with mortals while wearing a variety of unapproved bodily forms, causing moments of sexual and divine ecstasy to spread indiscriminately, and the humans in hir town got wind of it and were unnerved. They put hir on trial extremely noisily, examined hir Immaculate body. Demons all over the Earth were already in on it, laughing about it. We heard because humans started praying to Heaven that their children who were in love with Thomasina would not become like hir. Once we sent investigators, we only confirmed what Hell already knew. HR is still trying to figure out how it got past us so long.”  
“Praise be to God that you learned of it,” Aziraphale said hollowly.   
“We shall have our final revenge on Hell for this and other offenses someday,” Gabriel said cheerfully.   
The sun winked in through the windows.  
“Did Thomasina Fall?”  
“That, I’m afraid, isn’t finalized, and it will be confidential when it is,” Gabriel said, his grin relaxing into his usual flat unreadable benign smile. “It is unlikely anything else should happen, though I am advocating for immediate destruction rather damnation. But that isn’t your concern. Zie won’t be back on earth again on Heaven’s command.”  
“Of course,” Aziraphale said. “I should not have inquired.”  
“But enough of that. Back to you.”  
“I am sorry,” Aziraphale said. “I promise it was a mix-up.”  
“I know. But please, do your diligence about things like this. At the very least. I mean, think a little of where this plus the Thomasina ordeal puts us. We have to run checks now. I know we all hate paperwork, and I just have to say, more judgement on your part could have had us avoid this whole mess.”  
“I will be more careful,” Aziraphale said.   
“I’m afraid we still have to show you the training video,” Gabriel said.   
“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said. “You know I’ve already seen it.”  
Gabriel smiled a forceful little smile. “But we can all use a refresh.”

The training video for Heaven’s angels had been around since almost the Beginning. It was the first training video, meaning that all creative derivations on Earth that eventually surfaced, mostly created by Hell, were sarcastic memories of this original. It had been devised during the original battle between Lucifer and the host of Heaven, and, Aziraphale quietly believed, was the instigating factor in many angels deciding it was better to take their chances with the pit than sit through a small eternity of melodious harmonies cut through with messages from the Metatron and a poorly (immaculately) spliced narration track from Gabriel. But other angels didn’t feel that way. Many watched it as entertainment.  
The exact specifics of the video are hard to describe, to the extent that the experience can be described as a video at all. It did happen in several other dimensions, and was not exactly experienced with the eyes so much as it was an immersion of one’s whole Being in an articulation of Heaven’s mission that went on for longer than a human could reasonably hope to stay alive without food or sleep. It was colors and shapes and green spaces. It enumerated a few of the things that might happen on Earth, and spoke of how Heaven would intervene to ensure that Justice prevailed at the end of time and that the innocent and good and well-meaning humble souls being hurt on Earth would find themselves reunited with God and the Host in death and/or at the end of time, and how Heaven would work to ensure that people could avoid the sickness, death, evil, shame, horror of the Pit, would not be overwhelmed by it, would have the opportunity to fight it. Heaven ensured evil would be punished. All this Aziraphale remembered, and agreed with.   
The experience also involved listing the protocol for angelic behavior on Earth. A great deal of this concerned poise, splendor, attention to detail, moral uprightness, absolute steadfastness, care, patience, trust in Heaven, love for the legions of angels (depicted as identical, despite variation in Earthly bodies), love for the kindness and love present in humans, hatred for the weaknesses that the Fall had created in humans and concern for their redemption, paperwork. It did not allow for the possibility that an angel might desire something in the world, whether a sunset or the taste of a lover’s cum or the feeling of being loved for their particular foibles and anxieties and strange obsessions along with their power and moral fortitude. It did not allow that they might experience a creation more vast and complicated and inexplicable than Heaven’s vision allowed, in which things that were described as wicked felt enormously, divinely good, where love for complicated, difficult things allowed once in a while for a sense of material belonging and intimacy that felt like God. Aziraphale wondered if there had ever been an angel that had done everything the video asked.   
Aziraphale sat with the video, the colors and lights and Metatron’s ringing voice sounding inside him. He thought about how Crowley had hurt him, made him feel replaceable. He thought about how he still loved him, and would decide to believe that the connection they had was worthwhile even though it was clearly dangerous and possibly fatal. He thought how he was certainly an angel brought low, brought to the edge, not even happy any more with what Heaven had given him to work with.   
Heaven’s work shall be your work, the video said.   
Heaven’s work shall be my work, Aziraphale repeated loudly.

**Author's Note:**

> this work is heavily inspired by Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, which is a fun and gallivanting Marxist trans queer 18th century tale with a subplot about fen enclosure.
> 
> Works Used
> 
> Ganev, R. Ballads and Poems’ Condemnation of Enclosure in Eighteenth Century Britain. Retrieved from https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/2089/Ganev_105901.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.   
> Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare, ed. Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London, 1967) 169–70.
> 
> Great Fen: English Heritage. http://www.greatfen.org.uk/heritage/drained-fens 
> 
> Wikipedia: Stretham Old Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretham_Old_Engine.   
> Wikipedia: Early Attempts to Drain the Fens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fens#Early_modern_attempts_to_drain_the_Fens   
> Wikipedia: Bedford Level Corporation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Level_Corporation


End file.
